The ‘Buck Up’ Brothers

“People need to shake off this lethargy. People need to buck up,” Obama told Rolling Stone in an interview to be published Friday. The president told Democrats that making change happen is hard and “if people now want to take their ball and go home, that tells me folks weren’t serious in the first place.”

“And so those who don’t get — didn’t get everything they wanted, it’s time to just buck up here, understand that we can make things better, continue to move forward and — but not yield the playing field to those folks who are against everything that we stand for in terms of the initiatives we put forward,” Biden said on MSNBC.

President Obama is pulling no punches when it comes to Fox News, declaring the cable news outlet to be “destructive to [America's] long-term growth.”In a more than 8,000-word interview with Rolling Stone Magazine, Obama compared the cable news channel to papers owned by William Randolph Hearst at the turn of the 20th century that unabashedly pushed the media titan’s own political views.

“You had folks like Hearst who used their newspapers very intentionally to promote their viewpoints. I think Fox is part of that tradition – it is part of the tradition that has a very clear, undeniable point of view,” Obama told the magazine.

And you had folks like Jann Wenner who grew extremely wealthy using their magazine very intentionally to promote his own viewpoint. I think Rolling Stone is part of that tradition — it is part of the tradition that has a very clear, undeniable point of view. The problem is that 45 years ago, it was part of the counter-culture. Now it is the culture, and it’s willing to do anything to stop another countercultural revolution from brewing.

So Obama’s objection is really that there is a news outlet that offers a meaningful check on his power — that plays the precise role that the First Amendment aims to foster. Since I’m right, goes the president’s logic, any force that prevents me from governing as I please is destructive and imperils the nation.

Obama’s statement therefore boils down to this: liberalism is right and, consequently, impeding the wholesale implementation of a liberal agenda is wrong. Therefore, a media outlet cannot legitimately criticize a liberal president.

Hence, Obama longs for an era when meaningful conservative political objections were a rarity among the media elite. The press was much more responsible, Obama seems to think, when it recognized that liberalism is the only reasonable political philosophy, and reported the news accordingly.

4 Comments, 3 Threads

1.
John

Obama compared the cable news channel to papers owned by William Randolph Hearst at the turn of the 20th century that unabashedly pushed the media titan’s own political views.

“You had folks like Hearst who used their newspapers very intentionally to promote their viewpoints. I think Fox is part of that tradition – it is part of the tradition that has a very clear, undeniable point of view,” Obama told the magazine.

Judging by his demonstrable incompetence, the headline’s off by one letter.

Our radical socialist President, with zero real-life experience, elected solely because the radical socialist-run newspapers and networks covered up for him, pimping him as a messiah complains that “some people” have in the past used newspapers to promote their views.